MIA - again

 It has been such a long time since my last post. I didn't even manage a post at Christmas. Oh dear.

It was a very different Christmas to the one we had planned. We normally spend the day, after church, with one of our children and the grandchildren. This year  our son was having in-law to stays, our younger daughter was also having in-laws, so that left us with out elder daughter and her family. however on Christmas Eve she rang us to say that she had Covid. so we gatecrashed our younger daughter and her in-laws. It was a very nice day even if we were all a bit squashed.

Our littlest grandson was very upset (he is 4) at having his Christmas ruined by Mummy being ill as well as missing out on lots of presents. We planned to have Christmas 2 (as small grandson called it) on New Years Day. This time time it was us that spoilt the day for him as we were both down with a bug. So we had Christmas 3 on the last Saturday in January. My husband was well by then but I was not. I just can't get my energy levels back up and am still struggling now after two months although I am much improved in the last month. We had a bug, not Covid like our daughter, as the tests proved negative. My daughter is still struggling and in under two weeks will be officially classed as having long Covid, poor soul. She is hoping to start back to work part time before the end of March - but we will have to see how she is. At this point, she can manage to sit up for an hour and a half at a time and is wearing a neck brace to be able to do that. On Christmas 3, she and I sat on the sofa and let everybody else do the work and that was quite enough for both of us. Small grandson was happy though : )

I am still managing to go and bake and cook for the church coffeeshop once a week as there is currently no one else to help out. My husband comes and does all the washing up and clearing up and I do the baking. I do a bit and sit a bit and have been producing the minimum amount possible. I am really thankful that I managed to do some extra and put it in the freezer before Christmas. However the stocks in the freezer are getting really low so I could really do with some energy back. All energy producing suggestions will be gratefully received!

Merry Christmas

 Wishing you a merry Christmas. We have been to church for the service this morning  and are about to go to our daughter's for Christmas dinner. We are going to have a lovely day spent with family and with good food and I hope you enjoy your day too : )

It is beginning to look a lot like Christmas

 One week to go and I am suddenly way behind in my preparations. I have been in school every day for the last two weeks and it will be wonderful when the pay cheque finally catches up with me but I have been too tired to get on with Christmas in the evenings. I have been trying to write a few cards every evening this week and I have managed to get them in the postbox today on the last posting day for second class post. I have also written cards for the neighbours today too. So that is two items ticked off on my list. That just leaves a rather long rest of list...

We are going to younger daughter's for Christmas Day so I am not hosting anybody. I am very pleased about that since I am now so far behind. We always give the grandchildren stockings and I need to sort out my little stash of things that I have been putting away all year. If left to the last minute, it can be a rather expensive exercise to fill stockings for all of them. I need to sort out the pile of things that I have collected and see where the gaps are and then go shopping to fill them. but it is church tomorrow morning, the carol service tomorrow evening, baking for the church coffeeshop all Monday, the annual family outing all day Tuesday. And Wednesday is partly booked, as are Thursday and Friday.

Can I have an extra couple of free days before Christmas please?

Christmas is coming

 Well, I did not enjoy my booster very much. The nurse said that if I had a bad reaction then it meant that I had built up a good level of immunity. Suffice to say that I must have built up an excellent level of immunity...

We have our first carol service tomorrow and it will be led by my husband. At church we have a monthly afternoon tea for elderly folk in the community and that is tomorrow afternoon. The lady who runs it is excellent at baking so it will be an extra special Christmas afternoon tea : ) Hopefully the folk who attend won't be too full of cake to sing some carols.

The family have been sorting out who goes to whose house for Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Year's Day. So we are not hosting anybody but instead get to spend a day with each of our kids. And they all get to spend a day with each other. I have to say that I am really pleased that they all want to spend time with each other. If one of them needs a bit of help with something, then they phone us or one of their siblings, depending on what it is. 

I have the cards ready for me to write. First, though, I need to write a letter to send out with the cards to far flung relatives that we don't see very often. I always enjoy getting their letters each Christmas. I have half the items ready for the hampers but still need to do some baking for them. That will have to wait a little while so that the cakes are not stale.

Merry Christmas

 Wishing you a Merry Christmas and a Happy (and healthy!) New Year in 2021.

We have had a quiet day today. We had our church service on YouTube this morning, had a fabulous dinner (turkey with lots of trimmings - yum!) and then we did a Zoom meeting with the rest of the family. Smallest grandson was up at 4.30 this morning and got told to go back to sleep : ). Tonight we are just doing what my son calls "chilling". Hope you have had a peaceful day too.

Christmas hampers

 I have been making more things for the Christmas hampers. This year I decided that all adults are getting a hamper. There are a lot of preserves so I could really do with baking  something. My problem is that my oven is starting to suffer from old age and decrepitude. The hob is working fine but the oven is not so reliable any more. I have a microwave that doubles as an electric oven but whereas it seems to cook a dinner, it is hopeless for cakes and even something small like scones come out pretty rubbish now too. I was thinking that it is probably getting to the time when we need to revamp the kitchen but I don't want to buy a cooker before we do the kitchen because it makes sense to do it all at once. When we get around to it, that is, because neither of us has much enthusiasm for decorating at the moment.

Anyway, back to the hampers. I have made onion marmalade, a bigger herb salt mix, and some of Pam Corbin's (from River Cottage) souper mix. That is to go with the jams (blackberry and apple, French apple, damson and autumn), jellies (quince and medlar) and chutney (blackberry). Not everybody will get everything because not everybody likes everything but hopefully they will like what they get.

Then I just have to box and deliver them... socially distanced of course.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year to everybody!

We did not intend to stay up to welcome in the new year.  We have been doing rather too much for too long and an early night seemed preferable. However our next door neighbours had a party...  They are not quiet neighbours at the best of times and when they have a party, they like it loud. They also had their back door open so that the whole neighbourhood could share in the music. My bed was jumping with the bass turned right up. and they did not wind down until gone 2 am. Not a happy bunny here : (

Yesterday was loads better. We spent New Year's Day out at our friends' farm in company with a roomful of other friends. It was fun!  And we did not disturb anybody else. Today I am having a day off and doing absolutely nothing.  And an early night too, I hope.

Happy Christmas

Happy Christmas to everybody!

We spent yesterday with our family so there were 19 of us. It was a lovely day and I have very good memories but I am enjoying today with just my husband and me. and we had leftovers from yesterday's dinner that we just needed to zap in the microwave - lovely!

Christmas cake

I made a Christmas cake for church a couple of weeks ago and have marzipanned and iced it. I used Delia Smith's rich fruit cake recipe. She gives the quantities for various sizes of cake, both round and square, which is very useful. I put a couple of tablespoons of juice in the bowl with the fruit and left it to soak. for me at home, I would have used alcohol but we have a No Alcohol policy at church. I wanted the fruit to have a little soak but I was obviously too impatient and used the fruit too soon,  because the cake took four hours longer to cook than the recipe said. Four hours! My nice husband had come down to help me wash up and clear up and get some baking in the freezer (not the Christmas cake!) and he was not amused at waiting there for an extra four hours. Nor was I, come to that. In the end, the cake turned out very well and I am very pleased with it. So are the customers because they keep buying slices of it.

And no, I am not making a Christmas cake for us. I do very little, if any, baking for us. For one thing, we eat it if I make it and we both could do with a smaller waistline and secondly, I am all baked out at church : )

Delia's rich fruit cake recipe can be found at:

http://www.deliaonline.com/how-to-cook/baking/scaling-up-cake-recipes.html                                                                     

It is December now

Well it is December now and five minutes ago I was saying that it was almost December and now Christmas is nearly here. I've been to one grandchild's school concert and we are going to another tomorrow. I missed one on Friday when I was in school all day invigilating. I spent most of last week in school again and felt like the red queen in Alice in Wonderland who had to run just to stay in the same spot. To progress, she had to run even faster. I only had a short morning to bake at church for the coffee shop. And guess what?  All those Christmas shoppers came in for a cuppa and went and ate all the cake I had made and all the cake I had stashed in the freezer. And I did not really have time to go down and make more. So I went down early for the church service on Thursday evening and got some traybakes in the oven and then nipped out to the kitchen halfway through the service to take them out of the oven. After the service we stayed to ice them and finish them off. We left at 10.45 so we got to sleep really late and I had to be up shortly after six. It takes several early nights to make up for lost sleep these days, I find. And tomorrow I am back baking again because they ate all the cake on Friday and Saturday that I had made on Thursday. It looks like I am going to have to put in a bit of overtime in the kitchen after Christmas to get a little bit of stock in the freezer...

Almost December

It is almost December already. I have several boxes of Christmas presents that I need to go through and sort to see who I have left out and need to buy for. I collect presents all year round and put them in some boxes. If I see something at a good price that would be just right for somebody, then it makes sense to me to buy it there and then. I also do a stocking for the children and for each pair of adults and I need to collect bits and bobs all year or the cost of filling them would be astronomical. I just need to get the boxes out and make lists.

We have just come back from yet another visit to Cambridge for more of my husband's meetings. That is four trips this autumn. Thankfully it will now be spring before we have to go back again.  It takes a lot of extra cooking for the church coffeeshop to enable me to go on these trips and then when we come back, I have to play catchup.

I have also just had the invigilation schedules for the year 11 and year 13 internal exams. School does them as near as possible in format to the GCSE and A-levels so that the kids know what to expect in the real thing. More pocket money for me too : )

Catch up and looking forward

It has been a little while since I posted. I could say I have been busy and it is true, but I seem to say that every time I do post. And I could not believe how many spam comments there were waiting for me to delete. I do enjoy it when I find that a real person has commented but these spam comments are a nuisance and I find them really irritating.

We have been to Cambridge for my husband's meeting three times since I last posted. Thankfully, we are not usually so well travelled. It takes a lot of effort to get my coffeeshop cooking ahead enough to go away and then I have to play catch up when I come back too. And our minister has been ill in hospital so my husband has been filling in for him as well. And then there is the exam marking which takes over life at this time of year....

My new little hens took a long time to learn to go up the ladder to the perch area to go to bed but thankfully they have now all learnt. The last two are obviously bears (well, hens) of little brain. They used to sit at the entrance to the run and wait to be shown how to go up the ladder to get to the perch area. I don't know why they just couldn't follow the others. It would have been so much easier for everybody.

One of my new little hens was obviously older than the others and has been laying for almost a month now. Just little tiny "fairy" eggs but very tasty just the same. The other girls are showing no signs of being ready to lay yet a while but I keep hoping. My older hens are not laying many eggs at the moment as we are approaching winter. The youngest of that lot are very middle aged now and the old ones are very old. My oldest is eight years old and she is lovely - a real character but I am aware that we are probably on borrowed time now. She moulted very heavily in September/October and has grown a really lovely coat back. Very pretty. I am always amazed at how warm a hen is. I really shouldn't wonder at it because I would be cosy too if I wore a feather duvet all day, every day : )

I have not got around to making any marmalade yet this year so I need to get to it soon to be ready to go into Christmas presents. I have a couple of people who would be disappointed if they did not get any homemade jams and marmalade from me. I often do a batch of sweet orange marmalade and a batch of Mamade marmalade and mix them at the "boil to a set "stage. The sweet orange marmalade does not have a good set but does have a lovely flavour. Mixing the two batches deals with the problem of setting but still leaves a good flavour.  The Mamade is quite expensive but the cost is offset by a net of yellow stickered oranges for the sweet orange part of it. But I need to get a move on before life speeds up even more with church things in December as it always does.

We are planning a big family Christmas this year and there will be 19 of us this time. We have booked my daughter's church for the afternoon after the Christmas Day service. We did this once before and it worked very well although dinner has to be just a little bit later than we would all like. Everybody is assigned a dish to bring which just needs to cook or reheat. My daughter will do the turkey and just rush it up the road in the car when it is at the "resting" stage. I am really looking forward to seeing everybody on Christmas Day and watching the grandchildren open their presents. The youngest one will be 20 months so old enough to join in a bit. Being at this church works well because there is a room with tables big enough to be pushed together and seat us all. There is also room enough for excited small people to run off a bit of that overexcited energy and space for we older ones to sit on comfortable chairs and watch. I've just got to get those presents organised now...

New Year - that was ages ago

Christmas is past. We had a lovely family time. We split up into two groups for Christmas Day dinner and then everybody brought some food and we all got together in one house for a buffet tea on Boxing Day. I really enjoyed it and it was great to watch the grandchildren opening their presents. But New Year is past as well. We went out to our friends' farm on New Year's Eve with a few other friends and we had a fun evening and saw the New Year in together.

Now we are a few days into January and things are getting back towards their normal routine. I made about five gallons of broccoli and stilton soup for the church coffee shop the other day. I got the broccoli on the last day that Aldi had it at 19p so it should make a decent profit for the coffee shop. I also got carrots at 20p to make carrot and coriander soup as well.  And of course, I stocked up on Christmas veg for us. There is no problem about storing it all in a cool place this weather!  : )

We went to Waitrose the other day too. Waitrose and Aldi are only a couple of doors apart. Waitrose had reduced some of their Christmas items to clear them off the shelves. We bought a cooked ham which was a dry cured hock with a mustard and honey dressing. It weighed two kilos and was just beautiful. It was sold originally for £35 but we got one for £5. The bone was much smaller than I was expecting so there was a real lot of tasty meat for that money. Yum!

I've been invigilating in school again this week. I don't mind being paid for being bored. I did an extra session this afternoon as the real invigilator didn't turn up and they phoned me as I live quite close by and could get there quickly. Their loss and my gain : )

Wishing everybody all the best for 2018.

Advent is here

We must have got on well enough at my daughter's school a couple of weeks back because we have been booked to help with a school trip to Kenilworth Castle in March : )  I am sure we will sleep well that night with chasing around after three classes of Year4s at the Castle.

We are now in December and the Christmas round of busy-ness has started. Last week my husband and I cooked a Christmassy three course dinner for 60+ at church. We had a "Rudolph" starter which was a piece of melba toast, spread with pate and decorated with half a cherry tomato and a slice of cucumber cut in half and positioned to be ears/antlers. It worked very well and lots of people were seen smiling at it. They need to be spread with pate as close to serving as possible so that the crackers don't go soft...  I'm always looking for new ideas for starters that are economical, easy to produce in quantity and look nice. - and can be served on side plates so that we don't have to wash the bowls before pudding.

This morning at church we had the christingle service and this afternoon we have a group of elderly people coming in to have tea. They mostly live alone and have few friends left so we are doing a carol service for them and more christingles. We do this on the first Sunday afternoon of each month and the folk who come are always delighted to have an afternoon of chat and fun and perhaps a craft activity - and sandwiches and homemade cake. Hence the carol service today which is early in the season for it.

I have hit this year's target for things gone from the house. I'm very happy about this and it feels so much better to have hit a target of 500 than to miss a target of 1000 by a mile. I think I am going to continue next year. It will only take me another 50 years or so to have a tidy house... : )

504 items gone

Christmas 2016

I hope everybody has had a happy Christmas. We have! We had a lovely day yesterday with fifteen members of the family there. My daughters organised the meal with military precision and everybody was detailed to bring something to spread the load. We had a beautiful meal and my eldest outdid herself with 20 different vegetables. That is a family tradition because we all like our veg. Back when the children were all at home, we usually managed about 15 veg for Christmas dinner but there is a greater choice available in the shops now.

Enjoy the rest of the holiday!

Christmas is coming

It never ceases to amaze me how Christmas comes creeping up on me every year and I always get a bit caught out by it. I think it is because I remember Christmastime always being cold as a child and I keep waiting for the cold weather to arrive and stay for it to remind me to check the calendar. All year I collect presents for birthdays and Christmas so I've always got a head start in that respect but there are the cards to write, food hampers to make up and presents to be acquired to fill the gaps and then wrapped.  We always write a round robin letter too and that needs done. I've read some blogs where people have been quite derogatory about "boasting" letters but I don't see them like that. We have a lot of farflung friends and relatives and it is a way of keeping them up to date with the bare bones of what has been happening in our lives. I love receiving them too.

A couple of weeks ago, I had an email from a cat food company (Purina) offering me a £1 off coupon. Great, I thought, as I have two hungry young cats to feed. However, every time I tried to log in to my account with them, nothing happened. I tried using a different browser but to no avail. So I thought I would email and tell them my problem. The next day I had a reply apologising and saying that the problem had been referred to their techie department. They also said that they would send me a couple of sachets of cat food and a coupon to make up for my inconvenience. And three days later a little packet duly arrived with a £2 coupon and two sachets of cat food. And I have since been able to print out the £1 coupon that was offered in the first place. Just goes to show that sometimes it is worth contacting a company if there is a problem : )

Today I have been to school to see my granddaughter in her school nativity play. She was so proud of herself for being a star. It didn't matter that she was one in a line up of about ten little stars and that her head dress was too big and kept falling over her eyes. Tomorrow I am going to see littlest granddaughter in her nursery nativity play but I can't go to grandson's as it was a ticket only do and is restricted to two tickets per family. Boo!

365 items gone 

Happy Christmas : )

On Saturday, we were due go to lunch at a friend's. I had wondered why she had invited us about three weeks ago as we usually have a soup and a sandwich kind of lunch which is not difficult to prepare and leaves plenty of time for chatting.  Anyway, we got there and she sent me into the front room to collect something - and there was my entire family sitting on the floor and they all sang "We wish you a merry Christmas" to me.

This was a surprise Christmas party for me because I had spent the real Christmas ill in bed and missed out.  Everybody was wearing their Christmas jumpers and the grandchildren were wearing the outfits that they had worn on Christmas Day.  And there were lots of crackers and we wore paper hats all afternoon. We had a buffet because there was not enough space to seat 15 around a table but we did have Christmas pudding and later on, some Christmas cake.  They had a meeting last weekend to plan the details and shared the catering out between them. They even planned to park cars somewhere that I would not spot and they were sitting on the floor so that I would not see their heads through the window on our way into the house.  My husband was obviously in the know but had managed not to inadvertently let anything slip.

I had a great time and was so pleased that my family had planned such a nice surprise for me. Aren't they a lovely lot!

6 items gone

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year too.

So I am wishing you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year too. My husband went down with a bug just before Christmas and kindly shared it with me and we are just surfacing again. We are much better today but with poorly chests, dreadful coughs and poor breathing. The bug has upset my husband's asthma badly.

I missed Christmas! We had a grand day planned with 16 members of the extended family coming.  My elder daughter was in overall charge of the cooking this year (each household takes it in turn) and had delegated various tasks to everybody. She had booked her church hall for the rest of the day after the morning service had finished. They have a lovely kitchen with a nice, new cooker. They also have a small hall which has comfortable soft seating at one end, tables that can be put together to seat everybody together and still have just enough space left for the children to run off some surplus Christmas energy. None of us can seat 16 people for dinner in our houses and this seemed a great alternative.

 

They all took photos so that we could at least see the pictures of the happy times they had together. The second picture is the quantity of  roast vegetables and potatoes to feed 14 hungry people, all kept warm on a borrowed hostess trolley.  This picture made me smile even though I really did not want to know anything about food that day. It is such a huge amount of food but it must have been good because there were very few leftovers : )

 

Since seven of the 14 people are vegetarian, we have a tradition of lots of veg.  This year they managed to serve 22 different veg plus apples and cranberries in sauces.  I think they might have got the family record this year!

 

Wishing you a happy and healthy new year in 2016

We survived!

We cooked our Christmassy meal for 70 and have survived to tell the tale : )

We planned everything on Friday evening and then went shopping on Saturday morning.  We started off in Aldi because there are a lot of the things that were on our list that are good quality but cheaper there. However, they did not have enough of anything we needed... Never mind, we said, we'll just have to go to Sainsburys which is fairly close to Aldi.  But they did not have enough of anything either!  Good job we went shopping in the morning and didn't leave it until the afternoon because the shelves would have been even emptier.  So we bought what we could in Sainsburys and then went back to Aldi and filled in the gaps.  Then we went to church and found that somebody had put lots of stuff in the church freezer so there was not enough space for our stuff and I don't think you could fit more than a stray bread roll in our freezers at home.  Fun!  So we had to get creative.

On Sunday morning, we went down to church bright and very early and got cracking.  We have a large (6 ring) domestic cooker with two ovens so everything had to get shuffled round a bit.  We served:

• a segment of melon with maraschino flavour cherry (while they ate this, it gave us a few minutes to finish getting everything ready for serving the main course)
• chicken breast served in a mushroom sauce (using the sauce meant that the chicken didn't dry out when swapped around with other things in the oven)
• cocktail sausage (no bacon around them because we were up to our budget : (   )
• mashed potato (very forgiving to prepare and cook and doesn't mind being reheated)
• roasties 
• peas, corn, sprouts, broccoli, carrots (carrots were fresh but the rest were frozen)
• little ball of sage and onion stuffing
• gravy and cranberry sauce
• icecream and chocolate sauce/mince pie/Christmas pud and custard
• tea and coffee
• with the meal they could have orange juice, apple juice, lemonade and sparkling water or a mixture. (I like OJ with a splash of sparkling water best)
• the veggie alternative was a Quorn portion cooked in exactly the same way as the chicken

And that all came to just over £150 for 70 servings.  I would have preferred some form of roast or baked meat but with the number of servings and the lack of cooking facilities, we opted for the mushroom sauce because with having to swap things around in the ovens, I could see the chicken suffering.

Thankfully, we had a dishwasher to use for the plates and bowls and several people washed up the pots and pans and cutlery for us - for which I was truly thankful!  And we slept very well on Sunday night!  But we had to be up very early because my husband had to drive to Peterborough for 9am on Monday morning.  I don't really mind cooking for the multitudes but I'm glad we don't have to do it too often.

Busy, busy

We're feeding the multitudes again.  This time it is Christmas dinner (ish) for 60 on Sunday. We are just working out a shopping list...

We are involved in doing the shoe boxes for Operation Christmas Child again this year.  Only this year we are involved a little more than just in filling a box because my husband and a friend are driving round collecting the shoe boxes from collection points all around here.  They have to do a circular tour once a week for three weeks and another two people we know are doing the same.  My husband came home yesterday after his tour of duty saying that he had discovered muscles that he didn't know he had.  He had gone thinking that a shoe box didn't weigh much... : )

Anyway, our church is a main collection point, and our "checking the boxes" day is Saturday. As I shall be shopping for the meal on Sunday, I shall send my apologies for that. All the boxes have got to be checked to make sure that the things people put in them are suitable. There are some quite stringent rules about the contents, mainly to comply with the rules of the country that the box recipients will be in.  I also know somebody who has been involved in distributing the boxes to the children and the stories they tell are quite humbling.

I had forgotten to buy toothpaste for ours before they get handed in on Thursday so I called into Sainsburys on the way home last night.  I got a free yoghurt with a voucher and got a money off voucher (for something that I actually use!!) and a double points next time voucher from the till, so that was good.  I had been hoping that as I had no option but to go after work, that they might have been round with the yellow stickers but they had only done the first reductions and the price for everything was way higher than I would want to pay.  Still, I got the toothpaste and two vouchers that will actually get used so I shouldn't grumble.